Conventionally, when a small-sized document such as a business card is optically read in a document reading apparatus, it has been difficult to perform an automatic document feeding because of a restriction to a mechanism of the apparatus, thus documents have been read by placing the documents one by one on a document platen.
In an image processing system described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 8-289102, image information of an entire case in which business cards of given size are inserted, is read to be converted into image data, and the image data is sent to a computer side via interface means. In the computer side, an image analysis is performed for every range area of the inserted business cards based on the sent and received image data, and the image data subject to the image analysis is managed for each business card. As the case, a transparent sheet is used.
However, in the system described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 8-289102, even when front and rear sides of a transparent sheet containing a plurality of documents such as a business card whose information on front and rear sides is stored as a pair, are read one side by one side (or both sides at a time) by a general scanner to be subject to OCR (Optical Character Reader) processing/database formation, the front and rear sides are treated as different data. Accordingly, in the plurality of documents from which image data is read at a time, a manual operation of recollecting data showing front and rear information as one data has been required.